Face their fears. That’s another thing that resilient people do. This one reminds me of an Eleanor Roosevelt quote, one of my very favorites: “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

It's true, people who are able to rise above less than ideal circumstances have the ability to face their fears. And there is actually some science behind this one—brain science. The innermost part of the brain also known as the lizard or reptilian brain was the first to evolve.

The reptilian brain is that primitive part of ourselves that exists in the 21st century right alongside driverless cars, wireless devices, broadband internet, and iPhones. It’s tied to the amygdala or the fear center of the brain. The amygdala processes information in milliseconds. Think about that. From an evolutionary perspective, this is important and necessary because how else would we know to react when something threatening enters our environment?

As I’m sitting here thinking about this, I’m imagining the earliest humans gathered around a fire. A predator enters the circle and then the need to react immediately to the threat—again for survival. Are things really all that different today?

The amygdala processes information so quickly that the body knows to react before we have established the cognition about what exactly it is that we find threatening. Have you ever had the sensation of burning your hand while at the stove cooking and asked yourself while it is happening the question—which part of the pot was it that I touched? What did I brush up against? How did I manage to do that just now?

Or maybe you can think of a time on the road where someone swerved too close into your lane and you swerved in turn immediately before asking yourself, now how did that happen? Was the other driver on their phone? Were they paying attention? Were they talking to a passenger? Are they ill?

You might ask yourself these questions a couple of minutes later even and after the fact as you catch up to the other car and peer into it briefly. In other words, you reacted in the moment before you were able to put the pieces of information together to establish what exactly it was that was going on—and for good reason. This primitive bit of wiring keeps us safe.

From the New York Times “In an article to be published this month in The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Dr. LeDoux reports a study with laboratory rats that were taught to fear a flashing light by having it paired with a shock. Ordinarily, once the fear is learned, it can be gradually extinguished by regular displays of the lights without the shock; this process typically takes several weeks.

When some of the rats had their visual cortexes removed, they still learned to fear the lights - evidence that it is the connection to the amygdala that is crucial in forming such fears. When those same rats were shown the lights without the shock for several weeks, they retained fearfulness, unlike rats whose brains had the cortex intact.”

There are always two sides of a coin. The last post I put up was about focusing on the positive. And even though fear in general is something that we want to avoid, there is a positive side to fear. Fear like stress can rally our senses.

In a way, the ability for fear to be used as a tool for transformation speaks to the resiliency of the human spirit, which begs us to overcome whatever the thing is that we fear—the thing that is posing itself as an obstacle to our success.

Not all fear is pre-cognitive or emotionally based. Some fear is self-induced in a way--conscious fear. Conscious fear is the fear we feel when we imagine ourselves going on stage to give a presentation or walking down the aisle to be married or taking that job that we fear might be too challenging. Conscious fear is the fear that we ourselves generate based on what we expect will happen.

With conscious fear the trick is to focus not on the thing that we fear, but on something else. Instead of focusing on our fears on how the first date will go wrong, think instead of one good thing we hope to get out of the conversation on the date. Commit to face the fear.

It took me a while to overcome the fear of public speaking. Public speaking is still not something that I love to do, however, today I don’t avoid it. I focus instead on the importance of getting the information out there—whatever information that might be—the topic that I might be speaking on.

The process of committing to doing the thing that we are avoiding out of fear by focusing instead on positive outcomes can sometimes cause fear to fade. In other words, the positive outweighs the negative. Focusing on the positive might in some sense tip the scales in the favor of resiliency. This INC article lays it out nicely, citing research from MIT.

I’ve observed this about some people, including myself. We might be going through several life stressors and then maybe just a couple rise to the surface as say the top two. Maybe we lost a job and so being able to pay the mortgage is of primary concern. Maybe a loved one, like a caregiver came down with a terminal illness and so the primary concern is spending as much time as we can with that person in their last days. Maybe the concern is meeting a new friend who lives long distance and whether or not there is anyway to make the friendship work. Maybe there was a breakup and then the concern becomes how to move on and find a new best friend.

What I see is that there is a lot of work and effort and mental energy at times spent on making the thing that we don’t want to have happen from happening. We don’t want to lose our homes as a result of job loss, or lose that caregiver or friend, or former lover.

It’s like a dichotomy becomes set in our brains—that which we hope will happen and that which we fear and dread. Sometimes it helps to back off from all that thinking and look at it like this...even if the dreaded thing happened--that thing that signals some kind of downfall or demise, even if that thing happened--you, me, we’re all going to be okay.

It’s hard in the moment or thick of it to shift perspective, but it’s so true. There really is absolutely nothing to fear because whatever that thing is—we can handle it. So that even something that looks on the surface like failure is really just something that moves us further along and makes us stronger.

This shift in perspective relieves pressure and makes all that time spent in between events much more pleasant. It's amazing the amount of time people will spend clenching fists or teeth or digging heels and living in anxiety, as if all the worrying itself is a way of working on or through things.

I agree that the worrying and mental space that thoughts sometimes take up make as feel as though we're working on or through something. And I'm a firm believer in problem solving, but there is a difference between problem solving and rumination which is getting stuck thinking about the causes and consequences of events and the what if's instead of the what to do about it.

If we didn’t make mistakes, we’d have no experiences to learn from. I see most people as really just trying to do their best in life. And at each moment we’re acting within our level of awareness and consciousness at the time that we’re making a decision--whatever that decision may be. And so we can also forgive ourselves for making bad decisions.

Sometimes we think we won’t be able to sit with whatever uncomfortable feelings we’re going through—the anxiety, but we actually can. I had a close friend once, a professor who I rented a room from in San Diego for several years in my 20s. He taught Sociology at San Diego State University and was a family friend.

Every morning he sat for at least 30 minutes and meditated. Which I know is every stereotypical thing you might think of a Southern Californian. But there was a koan that he liked. And it's stuck with me over all these years.

A koan is basically a Zen riddle or puzzle to reflect on. It goes like this...

“The story I’m about to tell you, originally told by the Buddha in a sutra, concerns a Zen Master who, while out walking one day, is confronted by a ferocious, man-eating tiger. He slowly backs away from the animal, only to find that he is trapped at the edge of a high cliff; the tiger snarls with hunger, and pursues the Master. His only hope of escape is to suspend himself over the abyss by holding onto a vine that grows at its edge. As the Master dangles from the cliff, two mice – one white and one black – begin to gnaw on the vine he is clutching on. If he climbs back up, the tiger will surely devour him, if he stays then there is the certain death of a long fall onto the jagged rocks. The slender vine begins to give way, and death is imminent. Just then the precariously suspended Zen Master notices a lovely ripe wild strawberry growing along the cliff’s edge. He plucks the succulent berry and pops it into his mouth. He is heard to say: “This lovely strawberry, how sweet it tastes.”

It’s a great metaphor for life. In those moments where we may feel like we’re caught between disaster and death, look around and reach out for the strawberries. Life is too short really for anything else.